For serious discussion of the controversies, approaches and enigmas surrounding the origins and development of the human species and of human civilization. (NB: for more ‘out there’ posts we point you in the direction of the ‘Paranormal & Supernatural’ Message Board).

> A boat is literally a boat. You reserve a right to
> invent meanings to words, yet do not give such
> prejudice to others.

Have you ever gone sailing in a mortar boat or driven a car boat in a parking garage. To us a boat is a boat and a rose by any other name would smell as sweet unless the rose is a verb a color, or any of the other things "rose" means. But language didn't work like this with ancient people because every word had a single meaning and a henu boat only sailed on the pyramid and was the other half of the linear funicular with the dndndr boat.

Words mean what the listener think they mean in our language and are metaphorical. Words in the ancient language were literal and had a single meaning. A henu boat is literally a henu boat and we'd call it a counterweight.

> And apparently, you have no problem in thinking
> the people who wrote the Book of the Dead believed
> and wrote down superstitious non-sense, yet
> believing the PTs are something similar is
> insulting the ancient people. Seriously.

Modern language speakers are quite superstitious but this applied especially to the early ones who had confused ideas about reality and more especially to the authors of the book of the dead. I'm not judging them. They were simply highly superstitious and obsessed with death and the book of the dead reflects this. The authors of the PT didn't even have a word for "belief". Their thinking was about science and life and the Pyramid Texts reflect this.

We are still very superstitious today. We each have beliefs in something even when that belief is in the "laws of nature" and the models we create to visualize them.

I would say that the degree to which the term "superstition" applies to a people is the vector sum total of the degree to which beliefs differ from reality. Ancient people weren't superstitious even a tiny bit because they had no beliefs. Obviously people who wrote the botd were quite superstitious.